Consumer Internet & Mobile BBL

Consumer Internet & Mobile BBL

What you need to know to get started in Silicon ValleyMaisy Samuelson / @msamuelson / msamuelson@gmail

What you need to know to get started in Silicon ValleyMaisy Samuelson / @msamuelson / msamuelson@gmail

Topics

• Why Silicon Valley?

• Big company v. small startup v. starting your own

• Getting a job in Silicon Valley

• Classes to take

• Staying up to date

• Further learning

Why Silicon Valley?• Pros

• Leveraged

• Meritocratic (no set career path)

• Growth industry “Software is eating the world”

• Work w/ interesting people

• Flexible lifestyle (not client services)

• Cons

• High Risk/Reward (Gambling)

• Few obviously exciting companies

• Less structure/more chaotic

• Limited location choices (SF, NYC, Austin, Boston, SEA)

• Stress (sometimes)

Established Co v. StartupBigger companies: good way to start, learn best practices, established brand, meet people, little risk

Smaller startup: More growth opt/upside (if startup does well), fun work environment

Don’t work at a startup for the sake of doing a startup! What matters: 1) smart people, 2) good product 3) good brand

Don’t assume that smaller company means greater impact

Don’t get to caught up w/sector

Getting A Job• Approach companies with specific ways that you can help

solve a problem they have (i.e. wireframes for how you would improve a specific part of the site). SV companies value doers more than talkers.

• “Check your MBA at the door.” An MBA is not necessarily a positive in SV.

• Participate in Quora/Twitter

• Leverage LinkedIn (find interesting companies. Reach out to people/companies that interest you)

• Follow companies you’re interested in on Twitter

• Look at VC/angel websites for list of portfolio companies

• Make a portfolio/website/blog

• If the company not too big (e.g. <100 people) take any job and transfer internally. Don’t worry too much about seniority of original role--there’s room to grow and move!

• Network early, but realize that startup opportunities come very late in recruiting season (often May/June)

Getting A Product Job• PMs are risky hires for companies because they control

very expensive engineering resources and make decisions that can make or break a business/product. To mitigate risk, companies look for people who already have PM experience and a technical background. If you don’t have both, you need to be strategic:

• Write a sample spec for the company and make wireframes using Balsamiq Here’s a spec template.

• Exhibit these traits ... Intelligence (“you can’t fix stupid”), product sense, ability to lead engineers without direct authority. Check out Ken Norton’s famous blog post on how to hire PMs

• Get hired for an easier role and do an internal transfer (only realistic if company <100 people)

• Take the CS classes on the later slide and build something

• Get a summer job at Amazon/Microsoft. It’s useful to have the words “Product Manager” at <Company people have heard of> on your resume

• If you work at an internet/mobile company, it’s invaluable to understand how to build websites/mobile apps. These four classes get you 95% of the way there. They’re a lot more work than GSB classes, but grades don’t matter and they’re totally worth it.

• CS106a: Programming methodology in Java (take this in the spring of year 1, so you can take CS142 in the fall).

• CS142: Webs Applications (Only offered in the Fall and need to take CS106a first. This is the best class at Stanford).

• CS193P: Developing Aps for iOS

• CS106B: Programming abstractions in C++

• Learn SQL, html and CSS on your own (lots of good web tutorials)

• Check out iTunes U, Coursera

Classes To Take

Staying up To Date• Fred Wilson

(@fredwilson)

• Brad Feld (@bfeld)

• Chris Dixon (@cdixon)

• Paul Graham (@paulg)

• Aaron Levie (@levie)

• Bill Gurley (@bgurley)

• Quora

• TechCrunch

• PandoDaily

• Techmeme

• Angel List

• Crunchbase Weekly Newsletter (fundraising & acquisitions)

• HackerNews

Events

Recurring

•Hacker Dojo events

•Hackers & Founders

•Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leadership

Annual• TechCrunch Disrupt

• SXSW (Austin)

Subscribe to Startup Digest!!

Themes/Companies To Research

• Collaborative Consumption

• Sidecar, Lyft/Zimride , Zaarly, TaskRabbit, AirBnB

• Consumerization of the enterprise

• Asana, Box, Zendesk

• Payments

• Stripe, Square, CardSpring, Google Wallet

• Content discovery

• Pinterest, Spotify, Quora, Pulse, Prismatic

• E-Commerce

• Fab, TheFancy, Etsy, One King’s Lane, Nasty Gal, Warby Parker, Quirky,

• SoLoMo

• Highlight (et al.), Nextdoor

• Ed Tech

• Edmodo, Coursera

• Phone as remote control

• Uber, Exec, eBay Now

• Big Data

• Cloudera, Palantir

• The Internet of Things

• Nest, Lockitron

• SEO (app store and web)

• SEM (spend $20 to experiment buying google adwords and FB Ads)

• Analyze Business Models: How does X make money?

• Technology buzzwords (HTML5, JQuery, NoSQL, Bootstrap)

• Mobile

• iOS and Android platforms and apps. What does each platform allow developers to do? Characteristics of top performing apps? App stores? Download a bunch of apps and observe design/mechanics.

• Trends

• Alexa, Comscore, Compete (monthly page views, uniques visitors, time on site etc)

• AppAnnie (iOS and Google Apps)

• AppData (Facebook apps)

Topics to Research

More Reading … • Quora (Ian McAllister)

• All of Paul Graham’s essays

• David Weekly’s intro to stock options

• Blake Master’s notes on Peter Thiel’s startup class

• HBS Platforms and Networks materials

Design

• A list apart

• Dribbble

• Principles of User Interface Design